Censorship on a cosmic scale

Mukul Sharma, ET BureauOct 20, 2009, 03.33am IST

Is there a limit to what we can know about the universe or the nature of reality? Not a limit in the sense that we might never have the devices or brains to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos but a knowledge boundary we're not "permitted" to cross by an external agency. Such ideas don't necessarily spring from the minds of religious fanatics or the lunatic fringe but even from the writings of our great scientists. In 1992 the world renowned physicist Stephen Hawking posited a conjecture saying that going back in time may be forever forbidden because "...there is a chronology protection agency which prevents (this) and so makes the universe safe for historians."

Now comes an even more audacious suggestion from two distinguished physicists, Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Denmark and Japan, concerning the Large Hadron Collider which is about to become functional later this year. They say their maths proves that the hypothesised Higgs boson — or so-called "God particle"— which scientists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one. Something like a time traveller going back in time to kill his grandfather. "In the case of the Higgs and the collider," writes Nielsen, " it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus."

For the record, the multi-billion-dollar machine, built over almost 20 years by the European science agency CERN, was set to launch in 2008 but broke down after it overheated during a test run. The relaunch was then pushed back to late 2009 as more and more parts had to be replaced. Then, recently, CERN was scandalised when a leading LHC scientist was found to have approached al-Qaeda for work!

Are these convenient coincidences or is the troubled collider being sabotaged by its own future — a cosmic censor? According to Nielsen, all Higgs-producing machines will have bad luck. "One could even almost say that we have a model for God," he writes. "That He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them." Before we make up our minds it might be interesting to note what Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."